


how you talk about a pitcher

by transversely



Category: Pitch (TV 2016)
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:04:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8888431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transversely/pseuds/transversely
Summary: Unofficial annotations for eight pitching statistics, and five years in the minor leagues.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spyglass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spyglass/gifts).



> dear spyglass, everything you wanted out of a Pitch fic also happened to be everything i wanted, namely Ginny assimilating into the Sanders family, so this got quite a lot out of hand. but i hope you have as much fun reading it as i did writing it! 
> 
> this fic contains background Blip/Evelyn as well as non-focal but canon-typical mentions of difficult family relationships and imposter syndrome. i'm an enthusiastic but unevenly informed baseball dilettante, and any mistakes are my own and not the fault of my dear friend and number one baseball resource [khepria](http://archiveofourown.org/users/khepria), to whom i extend many thanks for her knowledge, ideas, and patient answers to ridiculous questions.
> 
> happy Yuletide, and enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

**1\. wins (W)**

 

 

 

 

 

The summer the twins were six, Blip’s team suddenly went into a Streak. It wasn’t just any streak, it was a capitalized, hushingly intoned, spit-between-your-shoes-if-you-even-need-to-allude-to-it Streak, the kind that meant good luck signs in the windows of downtown San Antonio and real likes instead of ironic ones from Facebook friends every time you posted a picture of your kids with the mascot. These were all much appreciated, but the resulting grocery perks were better. As far as Evelyn was concerned, the Streak was about payback. The Streak was about the good peanut butter.

“Nice,” said Blip. “This was actually what sold me on the minors, you just don’t know. Getting paid in coupons was always the dream. The draft can bite my ass.”

“A living wage, too! A living wage can join in the biting of your ass.”

“Jesus. I forgot they were trying to get rid of that.”

“Save America’s National Pastime!” they chanted together, and flipped the ceiling two middle fingers. From their bedroom came two whoops (“I saved the national thing!” “I saved the national thing’s  _butt_!”) and a glittery burble of Disney noises. Blip made an expansive gesture over the remaining plates of coupon bounty, which included slightly wilted spinach, the good peanut butter on crackers, and half a pack of plasticky cocktail shrimp Joel and Jordan, Little Mermaid fans each to each, had deemed too sad to eat.

They were licking peanut butter off their fingers in a kitchen whose formica had cracked to tortilla chips when she’d set a full rice cooker on it, but the team was on a Streak. Things were fine. They were fine. It was acceptable to repeat this to yourself with escalating degrees of grimness, just as long as you didn’t say it out loud or express any view on it within earshot of hitters high in the lineup or anything.

The other thing you weren’t supposed to do, as the spouse of a minor league baseball player, was imply that you were at all interested in how much the Streak had do with  _your_ minor league baseball player, and whether that might translate into the kind of scout action that could result in an embarrassment of good peanut butter,  _forever_. You were supposed to pretend it was a team effort buoyed by the mystical, holistic machinations of the front office, who favored no single player and thought only of the time-honored legacy and integrity of the farm team system and oh mother of god she couldn’t do this _._   

“So,” she said. “Honey. Baby…pie.”

“It’s not me,” said Blip, looking amused. “Also, baby pie.”

She liked the ease with which he relayed that it wasn’t him, that it was  _someone_ and it wasn’t him. The first time she’d seen him snow-cone a ball out of the air, he’d looked slightly embarrassed about the applause, not that it was directed at him but that anyone would be so enthusiastic at all. She could’ve sworn he’d felt apologetic about ending the play. She’d been sitting in the stands with a burger and a macroeconomics textbook, accompanying a fellow soror, but she’d set the book down then, incredulous, thinking about how to make him understand the gravity of the situation. Maybe if you peeled his cap off. Smoothed your hands over his head.

She did it now, the heel of her hand, sticky fingers pinioned away. He caught her palm and laved his tongue down the side of it and made her laugh.

“Bring a better distraction,” she said.

“You say distraction, I say dude on a you-know-what needs the calories.”

“So who is it?” She put her hands on either side of the countertop, levered herself up, down. “Come on, I’d  _know_  if I didn’t have night classes over the last four games. Isn’t it more exciting to catch me up?”

“It’s exciting to keep you in suspense, actually, but why not see for yourself?” He pointed a plastic skewer at her like a microphone. “You’re coming down to the clubhouse this weekend to say hi. Her dad’s finally leaving or I’d have had you down sooner.”

“Sure, yeah, when the parents stick around it’s really a pain to--“ It took a moment. “What the  _fuck!_ ”

He was grinning. He offered the cocktail skewer to her again. “Evie Sanders,” he said, “you ready to meet Ginny Baker, certified prodigy and first--oh, you know, first screwball pitcher we’ve had in this clubhouse in eight thousand years?”

“I’m going to  _die!_ ”

“Ariel’s mom died!” wailed voices from the bedroom.

“She’s not gonna die,” said Blip. “She’s going to call her mom.”

“I’m going to call my mom! Holy shit!”

“And have some shrimp.”

“I’m going to have some shrimp! Oh my god! I’m going to wear my Tahari dress!”

She did wear her Tahari dress. She got out of the car in the sheath with deco sunflowers on it she’d optimistically expensed as conference wear before her pregnancy, and a straw hat she hoped said put-together breezy, the kind of person who organized diverting paddleboat outings to take a minor league heroine’s mind off things instead of the kind who had spent forty-five minutes crying into the battered Formica counter on a Friday night because Greg Keaton from undergrad had posted a humblebrag picture of a food truck outside his Manhattan hedge fund, and that asshole didn’t even know what a derivative was until he’d copied it off Evelyn’s take-home exam junior year. She’d made almond shortbread, the only baked good she knew how to do with any reliability, and she swung the bag against her thighs, steady.

She wasn’t worried. She and Blip had mocked up this conversation enough times she was reasonably confident she wouldn’t make any dumb puns about Ginny’s last name. Smile--open your mouth! Check teeth for lipstick. Hand over the shortbread. Done.

Ginny Baker was sitting on the bench outside the clubhouse in industrial spandex and a mesh hoodie, clunky pair of headphones, a few dry leaves in her hair. She was built like a missile and changed tracks like a barge. When Blip called her name she looked up from something she was doing with a cleat, her eyes icily blank with concentration, and it was only when he said it again that she set down the cleat and chalk and swung her attention like an arclight, formal, impersonal and illuminating, to their faces. When she accepted the shortbread, she took out the box, wadded up the tote, and handed it back to Evelyn immediately.

“Give it back some other time!” said Evelyn, delighted. She flicked a glance at Blip. He crossed his fingers behind Ginny’s back. “You know, you’re welcome whenever. We don’t keep regular dinner hours. Or even regular dinner, you know…because people think offering day-old hotdogs to minor leaguers is acceptable. Acceptable substitution of payment. Haha.”

Blip was shaking his head.

“Thanks.” Ginny frowned. “I’ve never been paid in hotdog.”

“Well, you’re in for a fun treat! Hotdogs are the  _good_ days!“ Jesus Christ. Ginny’s eyebrows were up around her hairline.  “No, you know what, let’s forget I said that. I’m sorry. I was in b-school, I’m just super interested in the economic aspects of the whole—anyway. So you’re from Charlotte? Wow, I hear they have great--“ What the hell was in Charlotte? “--sidewalks. What do you think of San Antonio?”

“Hot,” said Ginny. “Nice parks.” When she understood Evelyn was waiting for something, she insinuated her hands into the pockets of her hoodie and said cautiously, as though passing a dinnertable dish she didn't want, “Free deodorant in the clubhouse.”  

“Smells like team spirit,” said Blip. "No, wait--that's not what it's called, right? The one song?"

Evelyn understood that she was receiving an opening, but it seemed inaccessibly small and receding further. She threw herself at it, all desperation, thinking about Blip laying himself out gingerly for a catch. Now she got it. Watching that kind of enthusiasm miss its mark—awful.

“Look--Ginny, Ginny,” she said. “I’m being awkward because I’m  _really excited_ to meet you. You’re going to hear this again and again, I know that, but I’m not—I’m not trying to feed you a line, or get a good word in for Blip, or something, I’m  _really glad_ to have you here. Just to see you around, to have my boys get to see you, my husband play with you, it’s just—you don’t know how glad I am. You’re the reason for this streak they’re on. The win record you’re going to have, it’ll be more than any pitcher this team has ever—” 

Ginny did something odd then: she looked at Blip. “You told her the streak was on  _my_ pitching?”

“It is on your pitching,” said Blip, in the same voice he used to tell the boys, a certain severity in his lack of urgency, to step away from the power outlets. “As far as I’m concerned, those wins were yours.”

Ginny looked at the ground between her spikes. She seemed unafflicted by the finicky physicality of the other baseball players Evelyn had met, who were constantly engaged in a panoply of minute adjustments. Toying with buttons, brushing at eye-black, folding and refolding the tongue of a cap. The wind shifted her hair, the strings of her hoodie, but she seemed wholly unmoved by the sensation. 

It occurred to her suddenly that this was also the first player she’d heard explicitly mention the streak.

“Right,” said Ginny, “right. Okay. Evelyn—it’s Evelyn? I appreciate you coming over, and the shortbread, and everything. But you don’t have to be nice to me. I like Sanders fine. Good glove to have behind you. Okay? I’m not—I honestly don’t know that I’ll find the time to come to dinner with everybody’s wife who’s counting on my pitching.”

For a moment Evelyn wasn’t sure she’d heard correctly. Then Blip said, “Okay, cool. That did not—where’s Will? Why don’t we go say hi to Will?” and took her hand, and only then did she let her head snap back so her hat fell off, into the empty tote in her hands.

She got a few steps. Then she turned around. Ginny was on the bench again, turning a piece of chalk over in her hand.

Evelyn went to her, held her hand, took the piece of chalk out of it, and said, “I don’t know  _who_ you met to make you say that, but I’m apologizing. On the whole team’s behalf.” She dropped the piece of chalk and flexed her fingers. “Nobody’s going to blame you if the streak breaks. I can’t—I can’t believe anyone made you think that because they called them your wins. Just take that, okay? From somebody’s wife. You don’t have to remember my name, or come to dinner.”

She didn’t do anything until she was back home, after a few hours, in the bathroom with the door locked. By then it wasn’t about being everybody’s never-complain pay-for-night-school smile-in-every-picture model minor-leaguer wife, or because someone had told Ginny Baker no one in the minors was going to talk to her without an ulterior motive. It was about the part where Greg Keaton had copied that take-home exam and now he could get lunch from a food truck outside a hedge fund building, and Evelyn had kale without seasoning in the fridge and liming chalk on her sunflower conference dress.

She had the dress under the tap, angling the seam of the waistband under the flow. She was scrubbing at it and ignoring Blip’s knocking. Then it was joined by smaller sets of hands, lower down, and she twisted off the tap and opened the door to the buzzer crackling angrily from outside.

When she opened the door, Ginny, looking miserable, said, “Here,” and held out a plastic bag.

She looked into it. There were paper plates, Dixie cups pilfered from the front office, Gatorades, strawberries, bananas, almond shortbread, peanut butter.

"Dinner," said Ginny. "Offer's still open, right?"

She took a moment too long to answer, and Ginny colored. "Sorry. This is the kind of stuff I eat these days. I didn't think how it'd look to like--a family, a real person. I think there's a Taco Bell?"

A real person. "No, you--there's fruit in here. That one never even has slushies."

"Good to know."

"I always wonder why they don't care more about your nutrition. They could pay us in...kale coupons."

There! A smile. Evelyn leaned against the doorjamb and watched it tune itself loud, then quiet. 

It was brittle out, a proper snap in the air. Evelyn felt it wash up and halt against the warmth of her house, what she imagined on the worst days could be a protective radius for the people inside it. Neither of them moved.

Eventually, Ginny said, "What I mean is I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said what I did."

"Right."

"I just--I hate hearing it.  _My_  wins. I know nobody even counts it like some kind of real stat anymore."

"Not even a little."

"People  _say_ it, though. People want to know, even if they act like they don't. You know what I mean?"

"I'd  _love_ it if I had something that got to be just my wins," said Evelyn honestly, to see if she'd laugh.

She did. "Sure, but then they have to be just your losses too."

There were goosebumps on her bare arms. They were probably both cold, she thought, distant, but for now they were just there, vaguely smiling in the general direction of one another's ankles. The sky behind the brim of Ginny's cap was a bright, bitter blue. 

“I just don’t like that way of talking about a pitcher,” Ginny said. 

She looked so terribly nervous then, in a way Evelyn would come to identify countless times over the next several years, a certain acuteness of concern from her that never emerged on the mound. Never there. Only like this, just some girl on her doorstep. She was bound for all kinds of everything, but just then, with all that ahead, Ginny was still the one who didn't know what to make of her. Evelyn was twenty-four years old and there was water still spotted all down the front of her dress, toes curling on bare linoleum, mind cluttered back to front with hedge funds and cocktail shrimp. Who had any business looking at her like she was the one with the answers? 

“For god's sake,” she said. "For god's  _sake._ " She took the peanut butter, and kicked the screen door open.

 

 

 

 

 

**2\. strikeouts (K%)**

 

 

 

 

  

Minor league baseball usually felt to Evelyn like the Greek fleet camped out at the siege of Troy, gossipping about new arrivals from across the sea who would turn the tide of war forever! (She was Penelope in this analogy, Blip was Odysseus.) You had your college ball darlings from Vanderbilt and LSU, and those were your Big and Little Ajaxes, whose fleets of accompanying parents and siblings touched off breathless speculation about immortality and actual pay for speaking endorsements. You had your sandlot discovery shortstops or second basemen, graceful middle infielders whose every crouch to tie a shoelace or untwisting of a Gatorade lid was executed with Gold Glove-worthy panache, and they always had their Paris counterparts somewhere in the league they’d been called in to destroy. These were all routine. But sometimes, you got that perfect, coiled rumor that electrified entire generations of teams, reeled in scouts from all across the lower 48, and kept the video camera sweatily in your hands for games at a time, never knowing what shining moment might suddenly surface out of what had formerly been a daily pan for pebbles. 

Sometimes, you got your Achilles, your pitches that pulled words like "invincible" out of you, as in: _invincible_ streak.  _Invincible_  screwballs.

By this point, most people on the minors circuit, like Blip, had been convinced the pitch was some kind of lost niche art like corset boning. Evelyn, though had grown up in Los Angeles and seen Hector Santiago, the last big majors screwballer, play for the Angels a handful of times, during which he’d thrown the pitch five, maybe six times in her sight. She’d watched for it, and one day, in good dugout seats, she saw it: that drifting pitch, the lazy line of its float, almost hypnotic and finally breaking away from the batter’s bewildered overextension in utterly the wrong direction and nailing the strikeout. 

But Ginny’s screwball wasn’t like that. The tone of it wasn’t dreamy or seraphic. When she set up, she did so with the prim discipline of a child learning penmanship, minutely tucked elbows, exacting, precise footwork that gave the windup the balletic look of a plié. This was what alarmed observers: the fact that she’d  _trained_ in this dead, mythic, immortal thing, the one most pitchers had abandoned all the way back in the seventies when they still thought you’d throw your arm out on it. She had done this so many times she’d massaged the mystery out of it like a bubble of air. That military set told you she could throw the screwball once, twice, seven times with no change in expression. Ginny’s screwball was about repetition. It was about time used, put behind you.

Evelyn had been a wide-rangingly gifted student, a conversational and unopposed debater, a numbers-minded strategy major with a Future, Potential, Anything She Wanted once she knew what that was, and she’d counted on taking her time to decide. By then, things had gotten ahead of her—just a little. She married the sober, thoughtful centerfielder who was just a little too good at baseball, so they were always staying in the minors for just a little longer. She’d had two children, which took just a little more time than one, and left just a little less in the bank account for just a little fewer night classes. She peeled her face masks off night after night in the mirror, watched them pile up next to the sink for reuse. It seemed out of reach in those moments that she was still who she was. She told herself the story of her life again in those moments, regaining the truth of it. It was only a little longer, that was all. Just a little. 

Baseball was the only place in her life where she’d witnessed what it was she needed. Santiago’s screwball, slotting into the strikezone, Blip’s gently made catch, all the way back in college. Those moments that bent physics. Slowed time to dregs. 

"That's  _horrible_ ," was what Ginny had to say about it. Five weeks in, the Streak broken and become a manageable, solidly lowercase streak of days past, she was taking it easier, no longer sitting on the edge of the couch to rewatch tapings with Blip and accept her plates of gamely attempted hospitality. She slung her arms everywhere and left drink rings on everything, kicked out her legs, sometimes into the lap of one of the boys, who would peal " _Ginnyyyyy!_ " in distress and snatch away a coloring book or stuffed animal and then end up tapping away absently at her shins while watching a Singalong. Ginny! Who otherwise couldn't stand to be touched! It was totally unfair and Evelyn had eighteen pictures of it on her phone. "If games went any slower I'd run out of juice in two innings. Evelyn, you're a sadist."

"True!" said Evelyn, laughing. "That's not it, though, I don't  _want_ them to go slower. I just like the fact that you can process, you know, after everything that happens. How often do you get a chance to do that in real life, anyway?"

Ginny gave her the look you gave a houseguest who didn't seem to appreciate the value of a drink coaster and left rings  _everywhere_ , seriously  _everywhere_ , why would you even be putting a drink on the couch  _under_ the cushions--she was beautifully unpossessed of any sentimentality regarding the game. Her pleasure in her strikeouts was grim, simple and physical. Exultant without awe. It wasn't a sacrament to her, just a high five struck with the laws of physics. 

"I don't  _want_ to process," she said. "You know yoga? You're so together, Evelyn, you seem like you'd be into yoga if--"

"Don't even finish that sentence. Don't even say whatever you're going to say. You--"

"--if we made enough to sign you up for one of those classes downtown, the ones with juice cleanses--"

"You're  _dead_ , Ginny Baker."

"--haha, so anyway, you know how in yoga you're supposed to be  _mindful_ , right, you're supposed to be in the moment? I don't  _want_ to do that. Every bit of processing time is like chucking pebbles at my skull. And it's just getting worse, I know it is. I can feel it up there. Everyone thinks the battery's hogging eyes."

It was incredible to Evelyn, every time, her lack of interest in reliving those moments that even secondhand were exhilarating enough to push her her feet, nothing but praise in her mouth even for something that objectively hadn't done much for her family, her husband, herself. "You know it's because you're getting this reputation for strikeouts!"

"So?"

She was highlighting passages in a case and tapped her highlighter against her lips, thoughtful. "So it makes people excited about you, it gets them thinking about the  _pitcher_ and not the defense, the hitters--if you want to wrap up without eyes on you, you could throw for grounders or flies, right? You could get hit."

"People can't hit my screw, not yet. If there were more regulars--" there was only one thing  _that_ meant, that meant the hypothetical of the major leagues. That meant the small circuit. "--then yeah, I'd get hit."

"So throw something other than screws." She wiggled her eyebrows. "Anyway, I was talking to Will, we have to stop giving those  _hecklers_ material. Boring sliders, now  _those_ don't have any potential for Youtube comment section cracks."

"Go back to flipping burgers!" 

"Shit. How'd I miss that?” She scrubbed her hand through her hair. “Would someone say that?"

"Yeah, so there are like--" Ginny unslung herself and crossed her legs, leaning forward like a Girl Scout at a sleepover. She seemed to hold these mannerisms in pressurized reserve, flourishes of eager, genuine earnestness Evelyn had done her best to melt and stretch and hammer out of herself into something else on her way to some more poised ideal of adulthood, without success. "Mostly people don't show up to heckle, right. But it's mostly families. And families are convinced--no offense--"

"None taken. Families. Passe as hell."

"Don't let the kids hear you."

"Right, I forgot about how Ariel's family is a beacon of perfection on this cruel earth, despite her  _dad_ being this--" Oh, god. Wrong audience. "Anyway."

"Families don't have any personal problem with me, or they don't think they do. They just want me to go somewhere else. To them I'm this gimmick that's apparently snatching the spotlight away from  _their_ hardworking--whoever. Son, brother."

"Husband?"

Ginny stopped snapping the ankle opening of her leggings and leaned back, pretending to stretch so she could look away. "Sure." 

It was obvious what was being said. Evelyn made a show of gazing at the open bedroom door, where Blip was reading the Phantom Tollbooth out loud to a litany of kindergarten cross-examination, listened to the bubbles crack in her soda. Eventually, she said, "Have you  _met_ Blip? He associates spotlights with interrogation chambers, they freak him out," and then, when Ginny tensed, "You'd better not be comparing us to those assholes. Were they pulling this tired white meritocracy shit about whatever their son, brother, husband kept  _you_ out of when you were starting out? Maybe they should've cared earlier."

Ginny stared at the couch cushion between her legs. The tips of her ears had darkened. Evelyn had had two children, a husband in one of the most disheartening jobs on earth; she was good at recognizing the way the air went when someone was on the verge of tears. 

"Ginny," she said. "Hey. Honey."

Ginny kicked the bottom of the couch with her heel, hard enough to bruise. Evelyn waved her fingers wildly at her feet and she stopped, morose. "Why are you so  _nice_ to me?" 

"I told you when we met, you're good for  _everyone_ ," said Evelyn. "It's not your fault you don't believe me, but it's not mine, either."

It was hard to explain to Ginny, but she could see herself clearly. Herself in college, her textbook in the stands, what had seemed then like her own heart dropping into Blip's hands, herself in elementary school, watching a pitch drag out the afternoon like cotton candy. She didn't remember the scores of any of those games. Why would she have come, if not for something that drew her? How would her life have changed?  

She said--helpless, angry, careful,  _careful_ : "Why are you ashamed you play that way _and_ fill up seats?"

She knew the moment she said it that she shouldn't have. Ginny tipped her head back, hair sticking to the back of the couch. Her arms, flung wide, stretched to their span; she turned her palms down and smacked the cushions, hard and Evelyn understood they'd reached it again, that place where neither she nor anyone else could follow Ginny. The detachment she shelled herself into on the mound, she had to take it into the locker room, the clubhouse, the bench out front where Evelyn had first met her. In these moments Ginny's worst characterization of the minors seemed to become accurate. She did seem alone, then.  

"I'm trying to tell you," Ginny said, eyes closed, "that's why I can't pitch differently. I'm the fill-up-seats girl pitcher, or I'm the fill-up-seats girl pitcher with a screwball. Right now, those are the only choices. They have to see the second or I'm  _done_."

Evelyn underscored a passage with a certain melancholy venom. This she got. You put time behind you, you did the same thing over and over, until you understood the next thing you could do to become someone different. Here was a piece of history in front of her and she was asking her to slow time down.  

She put her fingertip on the line of the highlighter, still wet. She thought she understood the obligation but not what this was like, to be wedded not to something you had chosen, but something chosen for you by being what only you could do. Something bigger than the story of your life. Minor league Achilles on Evelyn's couch, kicking her feet up, restless, marked with the clamp of her leggings, scrapes, bruises, moving across the cushions, gingerly, into Evelyn's lap.

She put her book on top of them. Carefully, carefully, she smoothed her hand over her ankles, her arches, all intent. Time slowed. Ginny's shoulders jerked, then relaxed. 

 

 

 

 

 

**3\. shutouts (ShO)**

 

 

 

 

 

"I'm so fucking nervous," said Evelyn. "I'm going to faint. Oh god, I shouldn't have worn these shoes, right? If you faint in heels, it's probably like falling off stilts?"

"No fainting forecasted," said Ginny, amused. "And if it happens, I'm supposed to be Snapchatting Joely."  

"You traitorous _ass_. And what about Jordan, anyway? No favoritism."

"That kid can't watch me heading for a no-hitter because it stresses him out, you think I'm sending him a picture of his mom fainting? He's going to be the sweetest guy in the first grade _,_ I'm not jinxing that."

"You'll jinx your you-know-whats, though? I don't know if he should be flattered."

"Because we're not talking about my  _no-hitters,_ my  _shutouts_ , say the  _name,_  Evelyn, we're talking about  _your_ final presentation, and you're going to be fine because of the method. Remember the method? Run through the signs again."

They ran through the signs. Louder, softer, speak more slowly, get that expression off your face, too much smiling, stop fixing your dress, you really need to fix your dress. Ginny had taken this with a charming degree of seriousness and painted her nails the way catchers did to sign to her. She'd also added the sign she personally used to indicate she was too anxious and wanted to stop purposely throwing towards a shutout, one she'd begun to use in the last year, when the strikeouts had stacked up to a point that threw her off and made her put balls in the dirt. This was to be used to distract Evelyn's classmates from some impending disaster by interrupting to ask a question.  

It went well, mostly. Students in night school didn’t have time to go to minor league baseball games and didn’t know who Ginny was; she herself looked deeply uncomfortable in civilian wear, flannel shirt and a pair of Evelyn’s skinny jeans, her last pair clearly some kind of early aughts relic featuring _flare legs_ (Blip had been instructed to snatch them from the locker room for ritual burning and had thus far proven needlessly obstructionist). In the year since they’d met, Evelyn had seen her dressed like this only a handful of times. Even at home, or out shopping with Will, she lived in leggings and jersey shirts. But she’d asked to clean up for this.

Evelyn was so discomfited at the thought that she forgot what she’d been saying about scrum masters and said “Hm!” in consternation. Ginny flashed her a sign. She shook her head. Wow! Just like a battery.

Ginny looked unimpressed. Evelyn, knee-deep in a soliloquoy about agile project development and training options, forgot how she was supposed to react and, in a panic, made the shutout sign: stop it, I’ve had enough, I’m done. Ginny raised her hand, leaning back on two legs of her chair. This habit she shared with every athlete Evelyn had ever known. But when Evelyn’s professor called on her, she lost that easy nonchalance and stayed silent for a full thirty seconds, looking, until the very last second, like she expected something to come out of her mouth.      

They laughed about it all the way home, once Evelyn had finished and determined from her TA that she would, at the very least, wrangle some kind of passing grade. They were so mortified they ran out as soon as the last presenter finished, heels, skinny jeans, all, out into the parking lot and all the way to the end. It was raining, that light southern skitter  that turned the pavements to black glass, and Evelyn had no choice but to take off her shoes. By the time they realized how far out they’d come they were in sight of the strip mall and ducked into it to wait until the rest of Evelyn’s classmates were gone. They got a quesadilla and sat eating it, tucked into the lee of the red awnings, the overshined windows.

The rain came past them and disappeared, in smooth, purposeful-looking drifts, into the salmon-colored clouds shirring the sky. 

"I didn't know you were so good with this stuff," said Ginny, shaking the water out of her eyes. Her hand in Evelyn's. "Finances, budgets--not many people can keep their eye on the numbers and still make you feel welcome. I should know. You should see the sleazy sports bars trying to lowball me on endorsements."

"Makes you wonder what I could have done, right." She couldn't keep the bitterness out of her voice, but it receded, quickly. The rain was chilly and sparkling and it was such a pleasure to be eating a quesadilla in it, her shoes in her hands. How good it felt, having her concentration broken for a moment. She wanted to remember it like this, if she had a choice. The part where the fact of no one watching you could feel like something you wanted, too.

Ginny rolled her eyes. "No, dumbass," she said, and took a piece of the quesadilla, just with her index finger and thumb. She flashed Evelyn the shutout sign, eyes alight. "It makes me wonder what you're going to do."

 

 

 

 

 

**4. zone-contact percentage (ZC%)**

 

 

 

 

 

“She’s going to forget,” was Will’s take, in the middle of the second year, when the twins raised an outcry that Ginny wasn’t on the chore chart and took advantage of it by needling them about missing a spot or failing to set her place correctly. Evelyn had put the new version up on the fridge. Ginny, usually over on Tuesday, Thursday nights, weekends, was a star sticker, the boys Flotsam and Jetsam, Blip a cupcake, Evelyn a football helmet, which she'd selected specifically for how Ginny and Blip pretended they didn't know what it was. 

“Didn’t you guys divide it up growing up?”

He shrugged, easygoing. He looked like he wanted to take a picture of the chore chart but thought better of it as she watched him, and then he looked guilty and put his phone down. He meandered around the kitchen before answering. Picking up Blip’s kitchen towel, setting it down.   

“Well, she had to play,” he said. “My mom and I took care of that stuff.”

But Ginny loved the chore chart. She liked loading the dishwasher best, a task Evelyn had always hated, all the mess, the clatter of dishes. Ginny loved them. “ _Twelve_ glasses!” she said, once, in infuriated delight. “We’re five people! How’d we manage to use _twelve_ glasses?” before she learned and became more adept than Evelyn at divining why the twins needed separate glasses for orange and red juices, why she would put a drink down in some random place as some idea or memory struck her and forget about it until two days later, why Blip could not, physically could _not_ drink beer in the same glasses he drank milk, why Evelyn needed the tall glasses for cocktails she planned to take into the bedroom with a book and the short ones for cocktails she planned to keep on the counter while stir-frying and turn around to find Ginny sipping absently, newly twenty-one and curious.

That autumn she went pumpkin picking with them, gleefully competitive with any rival seven-year-olds in a way that delighted the twins, who were usually diffident, and scowled her way through a variety of failed attempts to carve King Triton (worst idea ever, between the two of them it was a mystery to Evelyn how two minor league prospects couldn’t get up enough hand-eye coordination between the two of them to carve trident prongs into a pumpkin). When it was done, and Blip and Evelyn were staring at each other in shellshock, bits of seeds and pulp in their hair, Ginny shepherded them into the bedroom and cleaned up the kitchen with the twins, encouraging the kinds of lunatic experiments that gave Evelyn nightmares like skating on paper towels. In the night, triumphant, she tried her best to mull cider, which settled into unappetizing sedimented layers that they stirred enthusiastically with straws anyway, dredging up that last bit of sweet.

Those were good nights. Blip and Ginny talking shop with their cider or the virgin cocktail Evelyn made for them on game nights, fruit pulp and bitters and basil. Kitchen-table speakeasy nights. Those were the nights you could forget how hard it was. In the game, there had been a blossoming. Ginny wasn't pitching as many strikes, felt secure in trying things that might fail, risking hits. Feeling her way along like any other new pitcher. Evelyn was sure Blip didn't know the reason why. But even he could see that loosening up, the trajectory of the idea, working through her system, that it might be all right for her to justify her presence there with something other than the screwball. That she didn't need to justify it at all.  

Those nights Evelyn would look at the chore chart, at her star sticker. Ginny talking animatedly, leveling her forearm to the slant of an imaginary flyball. Maybe they'd had something to do with that.

One night, she was taking the kitchen trashbag out to empty, something they had to do nearly every day, in the tiny kitchen, when she saw Ginny in the courtyard with the boys. They both had their gloves on, the aiming board they used of the strikezone drawn in dry-erase marker on a whiteboard, and Joel had lost interest, walking around the perimeter of the courtyard saying something in a singsong voice to himself. But Jordan was staring at his hand, frowning. Evelyn set her bag down to watch. 

Ginny said something to him in a low voice. He wound up and threw again and the softball clunked harmlessly off the diagonal, well in the strikezone. It was an astonishingly good pitch for a kid, even Evelyn could see that, but in front of her eyes Ginny shook her head and kicked her feet at his heel, doing something to his stance. She didn't do it with enough conviction and he looked up at her, confused. She knelt, took his shoulders, and began saying something to him very low and very fast.  

Evelyn got it then. She moved the trashbag aside with her foot.

"Good practice, guys," she said. Ginny looked up with alarm. "It's a school night, though, you'll have to leave bailing Ginny and dad out for another day."

In the kitchen, she took care not to say anything until she'd gotten the juice and lime in a glass, salted it, and and slid the short glass to Ginny, the tall one to herself. The gold star winked at her from the chart.

Ginny sat at the table and turned her glass around and around in her hands. Evelyn started to move her hand towards her wrist, then thought better of it. They stayed back, as though they were about to dance. She was trying to think of how to choose her words, choose them carefully as she hadn't done with Ginny in a while. She'd become accustomed to speaking to her as she wanted. She wanted a shot of tequila in her glass and considered getting one. Not for any particular reason. Just to have it.

Ginny said, "I wasn't ruining his--stance, his grip. It's all fine. I just told him to miss. Every once in a while." 

"He's seven, Ginny."

"Joely misses, though." 

"And he's that good?"

"He's," she looked miserable. "Yeah. He's like me. If he sees the strikezone, he just. He'll put the ball in it. It's like he physically can't put it outside if he doesn't want to."

It occured to Evelyn that this was one of the first chances Ginny had had to see the talent she'd had as a child from the outside. The control she had told Evelyn she had even at that age, clearly the aspect that unnerved her, as though something else--speed, or a good build, or something--might have been an automatic ticket. But control felt like a choice. Control gave you the illusion of thinking you were entirely the one doing it, nothing to do with your body, or your habits. 

"A few more years--I thought he could just have, you know. A few more years until you guys found out."

Evelyn took a huge sip. She wanted to take time with it, hear the ice cube clink, set down the glass and feel the condensation paralyze her fingertips. She wanted the moment to slow down so she could think, and she wanted to shout at Ginny, or no--at Ginny's father, that was who. She'd only met him a few times and here he was, now. She'd brought him into her house.  

"Blip and I aren't--" She tried to choose her words.

"You can say it," said Ginny mildly. "I know you're not my dad." Evelyn flinched. "But--what he has here. Everything he has..."

She gestured around helplessly at the kitchen, the dishwasher, the countertops, the tiny trashbag, the glasses, the chore chart. She seemed helpless to describe any of it, almost resentful of it. And Evelyn wanted to tell her how wrong she was, how mistaken she was in how much she had done for all of it when she thought it was so separate. I was tired of going to games, she wanted to say. I was done with it, done with all of this, and the things it promised us while barely giving us enough for our family, our small life, and  _you_ are the first thing that's brought me back into those stands with any kind of joy again instead of dread. Inspiration isn't cheap. Proving life can still  _surprise_ you--why else would Blip play. Why else would I come.  

"This isn't worth losing for him," said Ginny. "Evelyn, I'm sorry--you don't know what it's like. You don't know what it's like to be this scared."

"Ginny, seriously?"

"How could you be? With this?"

"I am scared every _day_ I'm going to end up back in San Diego and people are going to ask me what I did, and I'm not going to know," said Evelyn. "I never thought it had to be--school, or work, or something, it's just. I want something I can use to know. To  _show_  I was good. You have that, and Jordan has that, too. He doesn't need to use it. But do you know what it is, not to have it?"

Ginny was looking right at her, the light of her kitchen held in her eyes. All her focus, and now they were here in reverse. She hadn't thought Ginny could reach a limit as well, an end point to what she could understand of Evelyn's life. 

"If you have that," she said. "You don't miss."

  

 

 

 

**5. flyball rate (G/F)**

 

 

 

 

 

The third year was hard. Ginny was all over the place and Blip was receding into his own head, the way he did when he knew he was about to lose it. Evelyn's temper got the best of her at the moments she couldn't afford to lose it and the strain jolted her awake at all hours of the night, false alarms upon false alarms. She could barely concentrate on her readings, hadn't been to a game in weeks. It didn't sound like she was missing much. Losing streak, just enough fame to be asked to speak or coach or make an appearance without pay. It was hard, she wasn't saying it wasn't. But in retrospect, things wouldn't have gone where they did if not for the spikes.

October. It'd been cold and rainy for the past two weeks and Blip and Ginny, ordinarily easygoing together to a maddening extreme, had sensed the change the weather brought about in hitting and grown snappish overnight, sensitive as any ballplayers to vagaries of glove/cap/cleat that Evelyn still wasn't convinced actually existed. In her own house, she'd set a rule that anyone who talked about how their glove felt different on waning gibbous nights or what have you would be subject to disdain and an appropriately named penalty tax.

"PP," piped up Joel in the car, as Blip, thunderous and covered in mud in the passenger seat, muttered darkly about his spikes. Evelyn turned around and offered him her fist, which he bumped with solemnity before going back to kicking his brother rhythmically under the armrest. 

"Princess and the Pea is a  _sexist_ name for a godda--good old penalty," said Ginny, who was curled up near the window, glowering. "Call it something else."

"Evie can call it whatever she wants." Evelyn shot a warning look at Blip; he was ignoring her, zoning out so determinedly she resented him, for bringing her into some unknown argument on some detail of the game she wasn't going to risk asking about and tripping a fuse.

"If it's a penalty for choosy divas," said Ginny, and punched the heel of her glove. 

"Don't go there, Baker."

"Like you didn't go for that freaking water balloon coming at you in the sixth?"

"Can we not do this?"

"No, because, see, I  _gave_  you that flyball, Blip. I've literally been  _giving you_ these flyballs. You could have my back. You could  _react._ " 

"Did you  _see_ what was going on with the grass out there? My spikes--"

"Your  _spikes_!" Ginny took off her glove and slapped the back of Evelyn's seat with it. "If I said a  _thing_ about my glove when I was out there, half of you would be up the front office's ass about  _making allowances_ , but you can blame your  _spikes_ for whatever--" 

"That's not what I'm saying--we should've been rained out and you  _know it--_ "

"Both of you," said Evelyn, "shut up,  _right now_ , or you're walking. Jesus, what's wrong with you?" 

She knew objectively that it wasn't an abnormal argument. Things happened at games, sometimes you didn't know whose fault it was. But before Ginny, Blip hadn't been in the habit of bringing many teammates home. The car back had only needed the space for  _his_ spikes and  _his_ grievances and this dynamic irritated her, suddenly, the retroactive realization of it, what Ginny must think of her striding out again and again to meet it. A hot, alien shame was stirring the hair at the back of her neck. She wanted to say something. She really did. Just--sheets of rain were sluicing up over the windshield, her stomach was in knots over her final grades and she didn't have dinner yet, she was wondering how to stall for thirty minutes until she could get something on the table, and it was the third time in the week Will had been late picking Ginny up.

She reversed without unbraking and the hand brake squealed, making both boys cry out and Blip murmur, "Easy."

" _You_ take it easy," she shot back. "She's right, quit complaining about your spikes. Everybody be quiet now and let me think about what we've got in the fridge."

They made it two waterlogged, silent blocks, wipers slapping the rain, before Ginny said, "Grapes, stale waffles, and that blue cheese stuff nobody likes except Blip."

Evelyn hit the brakes behind a sedan and the car rocked. Water drilled levelly into the glass in front of her eyes. "Thanks, Ginny. I guess I'll do something with that blue cheese stuff. You're welcome to take your brother out elsewhere if you'd like."

"I want to go out with Ginny and Will," said Joel, and it wasn't this so much as the look of sudden panic Ginny flashed at him, panic after months and  _months_  of uninterrupted cool-parent indulgence, that made Evelyn see red for a moment and snap, "Nope, neither of you are going  _anywhere_. Ginny and Will can do whatever Ginny and Will want. You guys are eating what we have."

"I can take them out," said Ginny. She'd taken her cap off and was sweeping her wet hair off her forehead in small, jerky motions. "I swear it's not a problem, Evelyn."

"Are you sure? It's more than just criticizing what's in the fridge. You don't get a break. Are you ready to sit there and talk about Sebastian and Flounder with the kids, or are you and Blip going to keep hashing out whether you handed him those flyballs or not? Because I'm going to tell you right now, the kids don't care."

I don't care, she imagined saying, and then didn't. Ginny in her seat, fidgeting furiously with her zipper--she'd been a teenager so recently. She wasn't far out from where Evelyn was, but she was. How could she not care?

"I care about baseball," said Jordan. His brother had gone quiet. It sickened Evelyn to hear the conciliatory tone, familiar enough to chafe.

That is not what I sound like, she wanted to tell him.

"She didn't invite us, Evie, just the kids," Blip said.

This is not my life.

"Don't be delusional," said Ginny. "Of course you too."

"You're my  _friend_ , Ginny," he said. "Probably my best friend. You know that. I don't want charity from you."

"For god's sake. It's  _dinner--_ "

"You gave me those flies? No need to--do things to get me noticed, or whatever. If it's rankling you so much."

"Chari--" Her face darkened and she slapped her cap back on. " _Christ._ My dad was probably watching that game, I have to go home, and listen to--"

"You can't do that tonight," said Evelyn. 

"I  _have to do that_ , I don't have a choice. You can lecture me about not taking a break like you know better than me what that means, Evelyn, but I see you judging my dad, my brother, how we're not like your perfect little family--"

She lost it, then. She was thinking about Ginny holding open the bag, looking inside the house as fearfully as any explorer on uncharted territory, she was thinking of how it had felt, that first early night, Ginny's trembling feet on her lap. She was thinking about the marionette windup-toy screwball and how different she'd looked stirring her cider with her straw, telling Evelyn things could be different. She was learning to pitch differently. She was learning to be a different kind of person and Evelyn had considered briefly that it might be the case for her, as well. Maybe she was becoming different, too, by increments. Maybe that was a little further. Just a little--

"No, I don't want that, Ginny." she said. "Neither did  _you_. You  _told_ me neither did you. You said you didn't want either of us to be your dad--"

"So I'm  _your_ charity project, then." Ginny was scrubbing with her hand at the heel of her eye. "Why don't you just say it. You don't want your kids to be  _me_ either. I don't have time for this. Just say it."

None of it was true. It was just that it was raining so hard. Evelyn was back in that place of needing time to process before she answered, before she explained to Ginny: none of that was true, it was only that she didn't know why there had been a game at all. She wanted her final grades, she wanted soup, she wanted Jordan to stop looking out the window in that awful contrition like he shouldn't have started the conversation, he was only eight now, Ginny was only twenty-two, she wanted Blip to distract her, she wanted someone else to make soup. She heard herself saying, "No one has time," and then she pulled the car over and stopped. 

"Call Will," she said.

Ginny looked at her with an expression of stunned disbelief. "You're serious?"

Evelyn said, "I don't think it's good for you to be here right now."

Will came. They went home and ordered pizza. Evelyn went to bed early, and woke up at four in the morning to her phone light blinking next to her and the notification that she had failed two of her four classes and would need to retake them.

She kept the phone next to her for the entirety of the next day, and then the next week. She kept it next to her, thinking, and she guessed she must have taken too long to think--just a little--because by the end of the week the rain had let up, and by the end of the next Ginny didn't go by the stands at all, making her way out with Will back near the end of the clubhouse. At games, she pitched her slow, high fastball; one shot after the other popped into the air, and Blip caught them all with his usual gentle deference. After that, there was no chance to talk, or to think about classes. By the end of the second month, the flyballs, intentional or not, had done what Ginny had promised, and Blip Sanders had been called up to the San Diego Padres in the twenty-first round of the draft. They had done it. He was a major league baseball player, and the boundary was crossed. Now she was only looking back from the other side of their life.

"Well done to you both," said one of the scouts who told her, shaking her hand. "Lucky for Sanders that pitcher started putting enough in the air to show off the fielding."

"Come on, it's always hard to say who should get the pat on the back," said the other. "That's the beauty of the game."

 

 

 

  

 

 **6.**   **walks (BB%)**

 

 

 

 

 

San Diego after all.

Her parents were astounded by the twins. Privately, so were she and Blip. They had while they were looking elsewhere grown into miniature people, not the tiny vulnerable dolls whose hands Ginny had held with such care in the San Antonio courtyard. These hands were larger now, chopstick-holding hands, calculator-using hands, sure and purposeful hands with entirely different slants to the life lines, the luck lines. Who knew which would say they'd done good. 

They'd chosen two different schools. She was proud of them for it, and of Blip for the day he came back to corporate housing in shellshock, kissed her under the carbon monoxide detector, and said, "I don't know if I even want them to get used to having so much  _money?_ "

Her family was a heartbeat but San Diego was more like bloodflow, her childhood welling up here and there when she turned a sharp corner and nicked herself on the shining, faceted new edges of her life. The freak lightning storms, the propensity to go barefoot everywhere that her prim mother and her shy sons had never gotten used to, but that Blip took to with ease, tapping his toes outside in full sunlight past the balcony of the new apartment, sunlight streaming down his face like tears in long golden lines while he downed the green juices they could afford, now, no more overflow cocktail shrimp. Pressed new dresses in the closet. Padres merchandise draped all over the house like she was some kind of out-of-towner.     

Eventually, she had to do what she'd been avoiding and go to a game with one of the other baseball families. Luckily, the front office took pity on her and sent Al Luongo's daughter, Natalie, a doctor who drank martinis out of an SNL thermos all the way through the first two innings and had gone to a private school like Evelyn's, all the way back when. Their childhoods were so similar that they circled all the way back around to the magic spot of very little to talk about, and ended up passing the thermos back and forth, paying a lack of attention to the game that earned them looks from some of the commentators, ensconced as they were in incredible seats.

"Before or after?" said Natalie. 

She meant the universal question, the baseball family question. The one you couldn't ask in the minors because it was too depressing. But here, Petco Park at sunset with Balboa Park rising up ahead of you like a cloud-washed planet, it was acceptable to ask whether you'd come to baseball before or after the person you were with did. 

 _The man_ , was usually the implication. In the minors. She'd hated that. Now, of course, she knew it wouldn't always have to be the subtext. 

She took a swig and said, "Before. Technically. I was Angels over Padres, though. Mike Trout, you know." 

"I won't tell my dad."

"Come on. I thought this was off the record, not espionage _._ "

"It'd be espionage and nepotism, that's why you're safe. I don't work for my dad."

Out in play, the pitcher lobbed a clunky slider over the plate and put it in the dirt. Ball four was called and the batter walked to first to a smattering of boos. Natalie drummed her nails on her armrest as though she hadn't noticed anything was going on in front of her. Evelyn had gotten used to watching Ginny, who didn't walk often, keeping her heat chart clean with the usual discipline that looked like barely suppressed rage. She'd nearly forgotten how disappointing walks were to see. What a waste. 

"I wouldn't have guessed. I think Sanders is settling in okay--he and Mike, they've gotten pretty tight--but you seemed distracted."

Mortified, Evelyn clenched the thermos tightly. "I know. I'm sorry, it's just an adjustment. And--" There was no point. "I miss our best friend, in the minors. We left her behind."

As she said it, she realized how ordinary it was. The ordinariness dissipated some of the weight.

They didn't talk then, listening to the advertisements play up around the scoreboards. Some sponsor had turned up with the kind of game that made the kids happy, mascots racing around the field in sandwich boards. The boys were receptive to her mood. They became so tense when she was worried she sometimes thought they might forget it was a game. Ginny had been the first person to have that fear for them, even before Evelyn.

Her eyes felt sandy. To forestall the feeling, she said, "Who are they? I see them every game."

She angled her chin at a couple of people sitting several rows below them, ignoring the game in favor of hunching over an ipad. They didn't look like scouts. In the majors, so many people showed up to games who wouldn't have given them time of day in the minors. Tourists. People on dates, mothers in groups drinking things with plastic straws. She eyed them all with a certain sense of resentment she knew was unfair. Blip didn't play better here than he had there. She wondered, as it had become habit to wonder, whether Ginny would have.

Natalie looked. "Oh--pitching fans. Sabermetrics people. It's fun for them, you know, such a pitcher's park. Only eighty-six runs here for every hundred in the average majors park. So they like to come out on days Mike wants to show off someone in the bullpen."

She kept forgetting the weights. The way every result meant something a little different from place to place due to the most minute adjustments in where the basepaths where, how far home plate was from the mound, the heights of the fences. It seemed both primitive and completely obvious. She was endeared, as she'd always been endeared, by the way baseball went into such absurd detail to answer, for your sake, the questions it knew people would demand of you. There were so many ways to prove someone should be standing on that mound. Before she'd met Ginny, she'd never thought anyone might be forced to think of them as so many ways to prove they shouldn't. 

"You like that stuff? The statistics part?"

The low, lingering light rushed across the field towards them, chased immediately by the vast, purpling shadows created by the arclights. They put their jackets over their shoulders, settled further into their seats. Blip was so deep into the outfield he looked, as he always did from the low seats, like he'd been stranded. Like she was sweeping in towards him, on his island, her back to the sea. 

"I guess I like the story," she said, slowly. "I liked the fact that you can be done playing and-- _know_  what you did, you know. Tell anyone what kind of player you were. Runs, errors, baserunners. What you'd have done if you'd had better fielders. What you'd probably have done if you had another chance. I liked that you had something on hand, you know. To show you you did well."

The pitcher's park was a canvas waiting tonight. The bombastic, beautiful spread of it, which in the darkening half of the sunset hours glowed the warm and pinkening blue of a ripe blueberry. This was home, now, too. She hadn't wanted to be back here, not like this. But things looked different now. Things could be different, with the most minute adjustments in where you were.    

"I hated my dad," said Natalie after a while. "When I was a kid. I hated being the one who had to sacrifice and sacrifice until he got to be here."

An inning had gone by, runs kept off the board. The fans burst into whistling, cheering applause. Evelyn found she was holding her breath.

"I still wonder if he should've started thinking that way, or I should've stopped," Natalie said. "You get caught up in wondering who it was who gave you your life. Who took it away. There isn't any end to thinking about what you deserve." 

"This isn't my life," said Evelyn.

Natalie moved her fingers on the railing. Her thumb skidding down the side of Evelyn's hand, her paling knuckles. Such a gentle look in her eyes.

"Even more so, then," she said. 

  

 

 

 

 

 **7.**   **completed games (CG)**

 

 

 

 

 

One Monday morning in August she saw twelve missed calls from Blip and called him back to hear that Ginny had been pulled out of a game in San Antonio and their old front office didn't know anything about it. Ginny had never, to Evelyn's knowledge, been taken out of a game when things were going well, and when Evelyn looked up the box score she saw that there weren't any runs on the board. She'd been doing fine. Something had happened. 

It was Jordan who called her. He'd seen it on TV, in gym class. When Evelyn saw, she called Blip again, and then she got her bag and her trenchcoat and drove all the way down to the locker room, noodling around the area and shouting for someone until she got Mike, who inexplicably handed her an ice pack and gave her a seat on the edge of the stairwell, blue lockers around and around them, mops, framed candids of trophies. She put the icepack against her forehead and cried for a while, and then she said, "She's been drafted. Baby girl. She's been drafted, and we weren't even--she must have been so alone. Where's Blip?"

"He's with the nutritionist." Mike never looked embarrassed to be around anyone's wife, was plainly one of those people for whom solitude had sharpened their appreciation for families, decreased the guffawing tendency to quip that had plagued so many colleagues they'd had in the minors. He reminded her of Will, sometimes. On the good days. "Listen, Evelyn. He wanted to tell you in person. He knew you'd be excited, so I told him--"

"Excited?! Ginny Baker was  _drafted_!" Evelyn shouted, and then buried her face in the edge of the hoodie he handed over. "Oh, god. You don't understand. I should have been talking to her. I--"

"Never seen anyone this excited about a rookie," Mike grumbled, and didn't even seem surprised when she pushed the ice pack into his elbow. "Okay, I deserved that. I'm excited, too. Whoo!"

"When is she coming? Just--tell me, talk at me. Don't let me talk. Why am I talking?"

Mike said, "yeah," and slapped the stair railing. He did a pensive, incomplete stretch of his hamstrings, and then he blurted, "Bereavement. It'll take a little longer than usual. She--it was her dad."

Evelyn waited while the locker room cleared out. She stayed sitting on the stairwell, coat in her lap. There were people coming in and out around her, shouted hellos, but she had the sense of being stranded somewhere, people in their uniforms washing about her, steadying her. The past five years and their ebb and flow. 

The sun fell in her lap, a slanting blue line between the shadow and the golden light tossed off the lockers, the railings. She was content to wait, while it emptied. She watched the incomplete game on her phone. Ginny had pitched until the fourth inning, and then--she could see it then, the moment when she must have known she wouldn't be able to continue. The parts of her pulled into herself, minutely, the sense she'd always had of being alone on the mound.

When she was ready, she dialed easily. There wasn't anything to push against in the way she felt. The ringing, the sunlight. The locker room at her back.

And then--there she was.

"Evelyn?" 

The last five years telescoped, briefly, flared wide again. Evelyn was twenty-four again. An ordinary day during a minor league streak. Waiting to talk to what she'd thought was a piece of history, now a piece of her history, the part of her story she could never have anticipated or described. Fall leaves in their hair and the sense of a season ending, too early, then, to think of a season beginning. They'd only been thinking of what they'd had in hand.

"I'm so goddamn  _sorry_ ," she said, not waiting. "For your dad, and also for not--I don't know why it's been eight months, I don't know how I let this get so out of hand. I should've been there. I should have talked to you."

There was a stunned silence. Evelyn thought about Ginny taking the call, laid out on her couch or two chairs or a bed. Spreading herself out as though to shield something smaller from view, something that existed outside herself. 

"It's not your fault."

"I don't care whose  _fault_ it was, it shouldn't have happened."

"Evelyn." She sounded different. More tired. That was to be expected. "Shit happens in families."

She heard the peace offering, clutched her phone tighter. Squeezed the ice pack against her eyelids until she was sure she wouldn't cry. 

"New manager, right?" she said. "I'm going to need to vet her, don't put anything in ink. Is Will okay?"

"I'm going to see him tomorrow. Didn't he call you?"

"Call me?"

"He's--" There was wind blowing on the other end of the line. Ginny had come outside. She must have been standing near where they first met, on that bench. Looking up at the blown-open blue sky. "He wants to start a business. A restaurant. Since he quit managing. He wants a partner, I suggested you."

"Me!" It was a sobering thing, thinking of her name in Ginny's mouth all through the months.

And how many times had she told her that, after all? That you never knew the extent of the space you took up in the universe. Someone else's universe.

"We weren't even talking."

"I told you. I want--I want to know what you're going to do next."

"Really?"

"No." A pause, filling the space between them, like that old blue sky. Pouring in distance but she is glad of it, now. She's glad to have known where they were, still, despite the distance. "The thing is--I want to be part of it. Whatever you're going to do."

"Oh, Ginny."

"I wanted to do it for my dad, for Will. They sacrificed everything for me to have this," said Ginny. "My whole--that's what my family's  _been_. My whole life."

"You--you're still a dumbass," Evelyn said. "That's not all your family has to be."

They let the truth of it unfurl between them, slowly, and then Ginny breathed out a rueful laugh, ragged at the edges, god knew how many days she'd been crying. "Thank you. For not congratulating me first. It's been horrible--the funeral, and--all the flowers, and I can't tell what's what, and. I'm a dumbass. God, I  _feel_ like a dumbass here alone."

"Is that why you went out when you knew you couldn't finish that game?"

"Oh, god. Why'd you look  _that_ up?"

"Blip was worried about you. Honestly, I'm calling to ask about  _that_. I guess you went out and didn't even think about the shape you were in? Do you even understand the point of bereavement leave?" Ginny just hummed on the other end of the line, as though she'd been given a task. Something absentminded to do with her fingers. "You're an HR nightmare." 

"I keep hearing."

Something occurred to her. "Oh,  _god_." 

"What?"

"You're going to be the first--the first--"

"Yeah, yeah," said Ginny, the smile in her voice. "In the majors. Evelyn, seriously? That wasn't your first thought?"

It wasn't. Her first thought had been that Ginny was coming to San Diego. 

"I can't wrap my head around it, honestly." A pause. "Hey. Evelyn?"

"Yes?"

A thin voice. "When is it going to start feeling like my life?"

Here it was, then. It never ended, here was proof in front of her that you could do more than nearly anyone had ever done and the world would still slip poison under your skin to tell you you hadn't done enough, questions that bled out of you like night sweats. Who was responsible for your life. What did you deserve.

Those questions she thought baseball hadn't answered for them, not yet. She thought of Ginny setting up for a strikeout, the legend of the streak, her boys with Ginny at the countertop. Baseball couldn't answer for who you were in those moments. But she thought perhaps it had given them counterarguments against the part of yourself, the part of the world that told you you were anything less than that. It could reply to any of those clamoring voices that you made more strikeouts than others did, that under you your team won more, that you could talk about your shutouts all you wanted and would never jinx them, that your aim was truer, that your balls went where you wanted them to go, that you finished games that you occasionally never wanted to play. That you no one could tell you you were a good wife, mother, friend, but that your people loved eating at your table and you were aces with the books, and others' people would probably want to eat there too, someday. That you would never have the correct way in hand to tell anyone how you'd done. You couldn't.

So you took the smaller questions. One day at a time.

"I don't know," she said. "And I can't understand it. At all. But I'm starting to think that doesn't matter as much as I thought."

Ginny was still there. Her presence on the other end of the line. Evelyn's family. Right then, someone could have asked her, could have pressed her to name what it was she knew about where they stood, how well they'd done, what she'd given and what she'd been given, and she wouldn't have been able to talk about a single sacrifice. 

"It's always been true," Evelyn said. Maybe more true, if they were never able to understand one another. "You're not alone." 

 

 

 

 

 

 **8.**   **expected fielding-independent pitching (xFIP)**

 

 

 

 

 

"Strikeouts, walks, hits, flyballs," said Evelyn. "Come on, that's Vogue waiting for you over there. Ha! Made you look. Some agent  _you_ are."

Amelia scowled and pushed her hair back. The wings of it crept over her shoulders again immediately. "Strikeouts, walks, hits, flyballs..." She sounded like Evelyn was asking her to repeat the initiation to a secret clubhouse. "Seriously. Evelyn,  _seriously._ Nobody's going to ask me about this."

"That's exactly why you have to  _mention_ it. Do you really need me to point out all these foghorn commentator dudes in the corners of the room? Or Tommy, over there?" She gestured with her chin. "Those people are just waiting to drop some shit about the integrity of the game, or whatever, and how they're immune to quote-unquote ticket-selling fashions, as if the Padres actually  _doing_  something about the so-called integrity of the game is on par with some flashy new concession stand or that hill in the Astros' outfield."

"I actually like that. I'm actually going to use that." She made a note of it in her Blackberry. "The hill. The Astronauts. We could do a sort of sarcastic space-themed--"

"No, they're not--it's not Astronauts. Astros."

Amelia made a sour face. "I'm just going to say the hill in the outfield like everyone knows what that is. Which, apparently, they do."

"They do, and they also know what expected FIP is. Hit me."

"How your run prevention should've worked out," recited Amelia, "under perfect conditions, and disregarding your defense. Ginny's inexperienced, but this season I hope you'll all be able to see that she has a past record of doing well with regards to the pitcher's solo accomplishments: strikeouts, walks, hits, flyballs." 

"Fake it till you  _fucking_ make it." They clinked glasses and tossed back the screwdrivers that were all Ginny's press team was allowed to drink.  

Over on the far side of the hotel ballroom, Ginny was circumnavigating the perimeter of the room with Mike, who looked bewildered and ridiculous and on the verge of blowing a whistle, like a gym teacher. Periodically he would bellow at someone giving Ginny shit about her bad start in the first game, then return to looking shocked at his own life. This was so diverting to watch that Amelia and Evelyn spent several silent moments doing it, leaning against the edge of the gold tablecloth. It was a heavy table, spanning the length of the hall. What they could've done with a spread like that, in the minors! Gathered around a few plates. Gotten to talk to each other, maybe, given a little distance from the years of struggle. It was something to think about, for the restaurant. 

Eventually, Amelia murmured, "It can't be good for her. This obsession with what you do on your own, what you don't."

Evelyn couldn't help it, she laughed. "You think people wouldn't have asked her anyway? More than they'll ask you." Amelia inclined her flute at her in acknowledgment. "It's never a fair question. But it's nice to have some answers in your arsenal."

"Mm."

"And look, you don't need to be so nervous. How you talk about a pitcher frames the conversation on  _your_ terms. It says something about--you know. What  _you_  think baseball is about. That's always going to be good for her."

Amelia's face went soft, given over to memory. She held her flute hard between her thumb and index finger, thinking. Her lipstick smudging against the golden rim.  

"I just want her to realize it's not a  _bad_ thing, if they took her for something in addition to all that. It shouldn't ever be something anyone should use to taunt her. If she changed the way someone thought about something. About their life." 

Evelyn smiled, and said, "If she inspired someone."

"Right. What's wrong with keeping it focused on that?"

"Nothing. It's just that that's how  _you_  talk about a pitcher. Not how Ginny does."

They sipped their drinks in silence. Evelyn spotted cocktail shrimp, took out her phone to text Blip, over on the other side of the room and pointing out Ginny to some reporter. Remember when, she thought she might write, and then she thought about the small questions. Small moments that let you know this was your life. 

"Speaking of focus," said Amelia. "You're sure you want to do this? With Will, and the restaurant?"

"Not really," admitted Evelyn. "But I think I'm done waiting to be sure. Right now I just--want to do  _something._ Get moving. Be on the way to sure." 

"Ginny wants to help you. So do I. You've--you know you've got our support."

"Your advice, you mean." Amelia made a guilty-as-charged wince. "I get it! And if I want advice, I'll ask. But right now I'm just thinking about doing my part."

Amelia still looked skeptical, but suddenly she broke into a smile. "I totally get it."

"Really?"

"Under perfect conditions, and disregarding your defense!"

She was still laughing about it twenty minutes later, when Ginny cornered her next to a Grecian urn, grabbed her by the bracelet to haul her in, and hissed "Okay, this isn't my fault, but I think one of my fake eyelashes  _fell_ in my champagne, and then I didn't want anyone to see it so I may have kind of...disposed of it in the way one does, of a drink. What do I do?"

"What do  _I_ do, you mean."

"Yeah, that's exactly what I mean." Her face contorted. "Sorry. That makes me sound like a--"

"Head out to the balcony. I'll see you in a second."

She took the long way around the perimeter of the room. She smiled at Mike, who gave her the kind of dorky wave she gave the boys heading off to third grade ( _third_  grade!). She went past Amelia holding disdainful court over a gaggle of alternatingly bored and delighted front office lackeys. She went past Natalie Luongo, seated far from her father and in possession of a martini, who gave Evelyn a dry, pleased look as she passed. She slipped a hand into Blip's back pocket, under guise of looking for a compact she knew was in her bag. He turned over his shoulder to smile at her.

"Hi," she said.

"Hi," he said, and looped an arm around her waist, dragging her forward. "Can I introduce you to a couple people? I need to get in practice. My wife, the restaurateur."

"I  _have_ got my Tahari dress on, so, sure. Raincheck, though." 

When she made it out Ginny was standing at the balcony in her new black dress, her hair coming undone and the side of her face lit by the silver-blue floodlight, in the distance, of the park.  Someone had gotten her a beer and this she held thoughtfully, with both hands, as though she were about to throw it.

When Evelyn called out to her she didn't startle, only looked over, but with a brighter, less reluctant lightness to the lift of her chin than she'd had, so many years ago, chalking up her spikes on a bench in San Antonio. She'd been waiting for her. 

She went to her and touched her cheek, moved her thumb up over her cheekbone until she had the other eyelash, lifted it, delicate, away. Ginny closed her eyes, as though making a wish. When Evelyn stayed, hand on her cheek, she opened her eyes. She set her arm around her. Their shoulders shifted and fit together, Evelyn's slightly chilled from the air conditioning inside, Ginny's warm, as though she'd been running here, in the night. Running to this place under the salt-crystal stars, the park's seductive glow.

She had to admit there was just something about it, this thing to which they'd given so much of their lives. Whatever it was, there was more of it tonight.   

Evelyn said, "The worst thing anyone is  _ever_ going to do to you from here on out is to make you think you don't deserve this."

Ginny laughed. No matter how long she stays, Evelyn thought, we deserve the memory of ourselves, here. Like this. Just a little longer.

Time slowed, for baseball, history didn't. For Evelyn, right then, it was a comforting thing for the first time in years, to know that it went on, along with her. 

Ginny was shrugging, bright and perfected, delimiting her own luminosity today like something self-contained, a drop of water, a bead. A little helpless. Not yet sure but on the way. "Well, what can they do about that now?"

She gestured out into the night. The park with its swooping blue wings, its thousands of seats waiting to be filled, the golden blocks of the hotel below them all lit up, farther on the humid fields of the south, all the way to Texas, to San Antonio and peanut butter, huge luck lines, huge fate lines, drawn by the movements of her fingers across the open hand of the field. 

She said, "This is our life." 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the end 


End file.
